Random Facts

[BeneathMyWillowTree]

I am straight arrow when it comes to my diet. Today I cheated and didn't give a damn. Although each bite of my 800 calorie Cinnabon roll I was thinking, "What the fuck! Really? This is almost my whole calorie intake for one day." Then I topped it off with In n Out. Back to boring diet me tomorrow.

[BeneathMyWillowTree]

I have written 162 letters to my love this year. I only have 203 more letters to go to complete the year.

[BeneathMyWillowTree]

I've been mailing letters out to my love for 8 months and I still get asked the same fucken question. "What is in the envelope?" Dude, it's literally a single piece of paper in the shape of an origami heart. smh

Damn, a letter a day for 8 months. I am close to a year.

[BeneathMyWillowTree]

In 9 days I'll be living in a mini retirement phase for a few months. If I don't feel like doing anything I won't. If I do I won't be on a schedule.

[BeneathMyWillowTree]

I never thought I'd be into watching Rugby. I am ready to watch Argentina vs Australia. Uuuuuuu this should be good. How exciting!!!

[CrazyTaraWitch]

Not only do I not own a muffin pan to actually make muffins, but I don't even own a big enough bowl to make the mix and eat it raw.

[BeneathMyWillowTree]

Anyone that knows me well enough knows how shocking it is that I have an iPhone. Not only that but it's a pink iPhone, and I downloaded Justin Beiber's new album on it. It's actually a really good album.

[sweet satin lover]

Gold eyeshadow is the in colour at the moment apparently

[Artemis]

So I thought this might be mildly amusing (tell me to shut up if you want) - at the shop I manage (insofar as I'm the only one here) I do a little daily sign thing, with the date and a random cool fact for that day, so I thought I'd share those here as well. (They're not doing much good in the shop, it's supposed to keep people from having to ask "What's the date?" when they're signing invoices, but most of the time they just don't look at it and ask anyway...)

So, today in the year 425 the University of Constantinople was founded, and according to wikipedia they kept on truckin' for about a thousand years before closing up shop, probably with a few of the founding students still claiming they'd finish their degree in a couple more semesters.

[Artemis]

Today's random fact (Australian today, 28th) - it's Stephanie Beacham's birthday. Did anyone else watch seaQuest DSV (yep, that's how they capitalised it)? I had a huge crush on Dr Westphalen - in fact I'm pretty sure Bridger/Westphalen was the first character pair I consciously shipped (because really before that time Star Trek TNG was the only show I followed properly, and they didn't do relationships much - I mean, Picard/Beverly kinda, but so sporadically you'd barely know most of the time).

[Artemis]

March 1: In 1966 Venera 3 becomes the first Earth spacecraft to land on another planet, although if we want to get technical, not so much 'land' as 'crash'. And since the planet was Venus, probably also 'melt', 'disintegrate', and 'implode'; still, some pieces of it may have lasted long enough to hit the ground, although probably not with its shiny coat of arms showing as the USSR would have liked. Not much in the way of scientific data returned, apart from "don't go to Venus".

[Artemis]

On this day in 1933, King Kong hit the world, and of course when King Kong hits something it stays hit. I'm somewhat unexpectedly looking forward to Skull Island - normally that sort of thing would be a 'see it on dvd' kind of thing for me but there's half a chance I'll go the cinema, on the strength of the cast and trailers. Of all the attempts by everyone to cash in on the whole shared-universe thing, this 'giant-monsterverse' is starting to seem like it could be a pretty good idea.

[Artemis]

Today is the birthday of George Miller, he of Babe, Happy Feet, and Mad Max. Fury Road is outstanding, if any of you haven't already seen it, or just travelled to inland Australia which is more or less the same thing.

[Artemis]

And staying in cinema, today is the birthday of Paul W.S. Anderson, who if you don't know his work and I just say 'the guy who does the Resident Evil movies' probably doesn't sound that great. But I'm actually kind of a fan of his - RE has admittedly got sillier and sillier with each sequel, but the first is near the top of the pile for video game movies and the first Mortal Kombat arguably remains to this day the best of those (not that 'video game movie' is a healthy genre, but since nobody else seems able to make them at all, you've got to give him credit for getting that far), DOA Dead or Alive is the most magnificent example of 'guilty pleasure', and I really enjoyed Three Musketeers just for sheer craziness. Plus he's done some pretty okay serious films - Soldier is very underappreciated, and Event Horizon and Pandorum (producer on that one) have a solid place in the sci-fi-horror genre. And he's the guy who took the job of directing Death Race and decided there'd be no CGI, they were going to crash real cars all the way (which admittedly has been surpassed by yesterday's birthday boy doing the same thing but with a much better story in Fury Road, but still, deserves a tip of the hat).

[Artemis]

On this day in 4008, the first Havenite-Manticoran War will kick off with the first battle of Hancock Station - this is Honor Harrington stuff, it's pretty good reading if you don't mind somewhat dry characters and frequent massive infodumps. So far none of my customers have noticed the daily calendar occasionally venturing into the future; I'm kind of curious what'll tip them off (and if anyone in January thought Babylon 4 was a real space station).

[Artemis]

So who else remembers having to learn the periodic table at school? On this day in 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first one ever, so we know who to blame (not that it's really his fault my science teacher had an unfailing gift for making science seem boring - except by accident that one time he was absolutely sure pyrex was immune to temperature variation, and stuck it straight under cold water after heating it over a burner and of course it exploded). In Mendeleev's favour, he can also be said to be responsible, eventually, for Tom Lehrer's 'Elements' song, so overall it's a positive.

[Laragh]

(not that it's really his fault my science teacher had an unfailing gift for making science seem boring - except by accident that one time he was absolutely sure pyrex was immune to temperature variation, and stuck it straight under cold water after heating it over a burner and of course it exploded).

Do they teach this as part of the degree? My science teacher did the same thing, except he just left it on a hotplate. By pure chance enough time had passed that we'd started our own experiments and had goggles on...kids got hit with it!

[Artemis]

My school was a lovely place, but kind of held together with duct tape and wishful thinking back then, so there were times "Can you start right away?" seemed like the main qualification for hiring a new teacher. It was comedically perfect though - he'd actually warned all of us about not putting glass straight under the tap after heating it, so when he went to do it a couple of students called out to stop him, and it broke right on the ideal punchline moment, just after he'd finished saying "It's pyrex, it won't break!"

No goggles (the school probably couldn't afford them), but luckily it was a kind of downward shatter rather than a full-on frag grenade effect. And the teacher's desk in the science lab was this kind of isolated podium thing with a nice big gap between it and the student benches, so we were all confident we were outside the blast zone of whatever he'd do next.

[Artemis]

On this day in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, to the frustration of everyone who'd just bought a telegraph and were now behind the times (get used to that feeling). I like to imagine frustrated 19th Century IT people trying to tell newly upgraded users "No, you don't have to say 'stop' at the end of every sentence, just talk normally!"

[Artemis]

Today in 1978, radio listeners were introduced to Arthur Dent in the first ever episode of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I had the Stephen Moore audio versions of the novels when I was young, and listened to them constantly (and adored Fenchurch, so obviously not a fan of the later books).

[DarkWiccan]

I have the original audio tape set of this recording. In the puffy box and everything.

And yes, I still know where my towel is.

Cheers!
DW

[Artemis]

Now there's one cool frood.

Staying in outer space, today in 2256 construction of the Babylon 5 space station was completed. New Vegas put the odds of it surviving at 200 to 1, which was fair enough considering the first three got sabotaged before they were half-built, and the fourth just outright vanished into nowhere, but luckily Earth Alliance was operating on Swamp Castle logic and just kept building space stations until one of them stayed up.

[Artemis]

Happy birthday to Olivia Wilde, a very adorable computer program in Tron Legacy (I mean, not Tara 1.0 adorable, but she's only human... or ISO, rather). I really liked Legacy, I feel like there was a lot more going on under the surface of it than it got credit for - lots of clever world-building that's never actually spelled out, just implied in tiny details (even down to the various programs' body language). I hear Disney's looking at rebooting it, which... I guess I don't mind, normally I'm in the "Don't reboot, just move forward" camp, but I can't really complain since, y'know, I did it too - and anyway, much as I adore the existing movies, what I'm really attached to is the concept of the digital world, not those specific characters. So long as they put some imagination into it, rather than just rehashing the story with nothing of substance added besides flashier effects, I'm on board.

[Artemis]

Kinda returning to a couple of days back, happy birthday to Douglas Adams (and while 42 is better-known, I have a very fond spot in my heart for his 'God's final message to his creation' that kind of trumps it).

[Artemis]

Another birthday today, Jaimie Alexander, who Marvel fans (hi) will recognise as Lady Sif, one of Asgard's most badass warriors. Also (I just found out today looking her up) engaged for a while to Peter Facinelli, who played Maxwell Lord on the first season of Supergirl; pity a) they're not still together and b) he hasn't shown up in season two, or there'd be a better than average chance I could daydream about her showing up as Kristin Wells/Superwoman or something.

[Artemis]

Today (according to some site I looked at) saw the release of the sci-fi classic Metropolis... in the US. It was released for the first time on January 10, but today turned up really short on milestones in the 'something kinda to do with sci-fi or science or just something I think is cool' stakes. Apollo 9 safely returned to Earth, which is a cool thing, but was still basically testing the tech for future missions. Someone found footprints 350,000 years old in Italy. Longest tunnel in the world was opened in Japan. I checked the date on Memory Alpha, and they've got a list including which day of filming was going on for various episodes at the time (seriously, March 13 1991, four days into filming 'The Host' on TNG - the one where an alien gets stuck in Riker rather than the other way around for once), which seems a little excessive (although given the paperwork to reference I'm sure they'd be listing which scenes were filmed on which day; I say this with affection as I totally am one myself, but, Trekkies). Tomorrow's cool though, just wait.

[Artemis]

March 14 is Pi day, and today's daily sign in the store commemorates Ultimate Pi Day - 3/14/1592. If that were still in the future, I bet there'd be a website for people who believe the fabric of spacetime's going to turn itself inside out then. Personal favourite use of pi: somehow showing the safe path across the chess board of death in the Tower of Rassilon in 'The Five Doctors'. I always found it kind of comical that the Master does all these elaborate jumps and hops to get across, and the First Doctor apparently decides he's mathematically safe to just stroll straight ahead. (Second favourite: Discworld's Blood Stupid Johnson deciding pi was untidy and doing all his architectural calculations with it rounded off to 3.)

[Artemis]

Today in 1956, Anne Francis sta-arred in Forbidden Planet, and among many many people inspired by it was this guy called Gene Roddenberry who thought "Huh, people in a spaceship visiting other worlds, interesting...", so that W/T Star Trek fic I did owes itself to this. Also the Rocky Horror one, in a slightly less crucial way. You could make a decent argument for Babylon 5 as well. One of these days I should just cut out the middleman and do a W/T Forbidden Planet fic (but not right now, I'm busy working on the Ice Cream Challenge) (I think Buffy would be the robot, just for giggles).

[Artemis]

Today in 1926 Robert Goddard went out into a field in Massachusetts and fired off the first ever liquid-fuelled rocket, which hit a cabbage patch. The rocket's the important bit, what with being step one of the space age. (Although it did also prevent cabbage patches from trying to take over the world for the next six decades, until the Cabbage Patch Kids made their move in the 80s, so that was good too; you may gather I don't like cabbage.)

[Artemis]

Happy birthday to John Boyega, aka Finn from the new Star Wars. I loved all of the second trailer to come out (the first that was a 'real' trailer, not a teaser... there are so many trailers and teasers and tv spots and whatnot for films now I have trouble keeping track of which trailer is which), but I think his last shot was the one that really sold me, when he holds up the saber and his face is so clearly going "Oh crap crap CRAP!" That made me feel like the film wasn't just going to throw in the standard Star Wars bits and pieces - lightsaber fight, space battle, dude in mask, scoundrel - without really doing any work with them (prequels), this one was going to do something genuine with the tropes, like the originals. And it pretty much did, yay.